Arrondissement of Liège

We woke up at 8am this morning and after tea and coffee in bed we put the bed stuff away and got dressed and got Wanda ready for a short drive to the first of today’s stops.
It was further away than we thought thanks to google maps working everything out as the crow flies until you ask for directions and then it plots a route and tells us it’s actually twice as far as we thought.
At 10:30am we arrived at Fort Eban-Emael and it was packed and we found the only parking spot left in the whole car park. We couldn’t work out if everyone was here for the fort or for the hiking and biking trails.
We locked Wanda up, leaving the top vent open as it was getting pretty warm outside already and then wandered the short distance to the entrance.
It looks an imposing sight with its steel doors and 3ft reinforced concrete walls and as we went through the entrance we were into an unbelievably long tunnel of at least 100 meters and on a downwards slope straight away.
Various doorways were on our left and right, most of the doors were locked but we did have access to the transformer room and the officers quarters. All of this was before we even got to the ticket office.
Once we had bought tickets we were given a map and guided ourselves around the underground fort.
Fort Eben-Emael was built between 1932 and 1935 as one of the largest subterranean fortifications in Europe.
In may 1940 as the Germans advanced the Belgian soldiers had to the hold the forts at Eban-Emael and Liege for just 7 days whilst allied forces made their way across France and into Belgium. Unbeknown to anyone Hitler had been training German paratroopers in secret for 6 months previously and had assigned a special forces detachment to seize both forts at the same time.
The forts were heavily guarded with Canons and even anti tank walls and anti aircraft guns. Nobody expected what happened next.
On the 10th May 1940 undercover of darkness, 10 junkers bombers took off from Germany towing 10 gliders each with 10 paratroopers inside. They climbed to an altitude of 2500ft and were guided by lights over Holland and then the Gliders were released to glide 25km on their own to the destination of the forts.
Nobody had ever seen gliders before so even though the Belgians saw them coming they just thought they were aircraft in trouble because they made no sounds.
The gliders landed right in the centre of the forts and the Germans poured out.
The Germans also had new 50kg hollow explosives and destroyed most of the forts outer canons within minutes and in less than an hour the fort was taken by Germans.
The spectacular and innovative attack on the fort by an elite unit of German paratroopers on 10 May 1940 was the first airborne assault of it’s kind and marked the tragic start of World War II in Western Europe.
Inside the fort it iextends over 45 hectares on 2 subterranean levels, with 17 above-ground bunkers and associated field fortifications. It could accommodate a garrison of 1200 soldiers and has a vast network of 5Km of underground galleries
During the German raid 27 Belgian solders and 6 Germans were killed but there were hundreds of casualties. In the parts of the fort where soldiers had died there were photos of them on the walls the oldest was just 24.
We were amazed at the scale of the fort and we wandered around the underground tunnels for 90 minutes before resurfacing.
Back in to daylight we decided to walk along the top of the fort. Here you can see the real scale because all of the turrets and battlements are at ground level, we could even see the bullet holes and blast holes from the 50kg hollow explosives the Germans used. The outside walk was over 2 miles just to give you a scale of big the fort is.
We spent 3 hours looking around the Fort and we were really pleased we went.Read more